Monday, February 09, 2015

Lies the Media Told Me

Marshall McLuhan's claim that 'the medium is
the message” is a rule of thumb adopted by today’s news media. Truth is
optional, and the means by which it is delivered to the public has become a
matter of “style” and bias. If truth does not comport with an established
narrative, falsehood is permissible. After all, the public, to whom the news is
directed, doesn’t know the difference.

Truth, in the news media, is becoming more and more as
rare as a halal hamburger in Riyadh,
or a wine list in a Tehran restaurant. If a news event doesn’t fit the New York
Times’s printable meme or mantra, it isn't going to be reported without
slanting and bias so severe that even a cursory examination of it will capsize
the story to reveal the rust and barnacles on its hull. The same rule of thumb
goes for most news organizations and outlets, including the Washington Post and
other “major” dailies. Almost every one of them delivers messages, not news.

Most of them don’t even pretend to be paragons of journalism anymore. What, after all, is a
journal? It is a record of
significant or noteworthy events, entered without prejudice for or against the
things in the events. The news media couldn’t even report Paul Revere shouting
“The British are coming!” without injecting some squib about gay rights,
because some of the British officers were perhaps gay, and any shots fired at
them could be said to be “homophobic.”

“Cow bites milkmaid” won't be reported by the New York
Times without some subtle, sub-textual message about animal rights or gender
exploitation.Virtually the only realm
of unbiased news reportage left in any medium is the obituaries, and sometimes even
those are skewed when the deceased was a celebrity or a politician whose true
character is not only suspect but so reeking with scandal (e.g., the passing of
Ted Kennedy) that toxic fumes leak from the person’s casket. That’s another
kind of “odor
of sanctity.” It can't be dispersed or disguised by a gallon of eau de cologne spritzers.

The phony war
stories of Brian Williams are but the tip of the media practice and culture of
rearranging reality to suit a fantasy world of political correctness and to
satisfy a hankering for a “perfect” world. Perhaps he thought that if Hillary
Clinton could get away with lying about her “dodging bullets” in Bosnia for so
long before being found out, he could get away with claiming that the helicopter
he was riding in Iraq came under
RPG fire, when no such thing happened. Hillary claimed that she
“misremembered” the imaginary
sniper fire episode in Bosnia in 1996. “Misremembering” things seems to be
as common a thing as zits on a high school sophomore.

In the aftermath of
Hurricane Katrina, Williams was photographed in waders sloshing thru flood
waters. He claimed to have seen bodies floating under his hotel window, and
that gangs had invaded his hotel and he was frightened. None of this happened,
except for the photo-op. The rest was his imagination. He and his ilk can
always claim, when the truth contracts their assertions, that the problem is a
matter of “misremembering,” or symptoms of “post-combat mental trauma.”

As Daniel Greenfield put it in his FrontPage article of
February 9th, “Brian
Williams for President,” about the major news networks abetting the
“misdemeanor” of lying to the public because the lies help to advance the
Progressive agenda of turning America into a minimum security correctional
facility :

Brian Williams is in trouble for
lying, but he was part of a media culture of deceit where lies were acceptable
for a good progressive cause. Williams isn’t really in trouble because he lied,
but because he got caught. Worse still, the lies were self-serving. They served
Brian Williams; they didn’t serve the left.

Williams had failed to draw the line
between the “good lie” (ObamaCare is making life better) and the “bad lie” (I
swam the flooded French Quarter with puppies on my back during Katrina while Al
Qaeda shot RPGs at me). But the borders between the “good lie” and the “bad
lie” have been vague when it comes to the titans of the left.

If he thought he could get away with another whopper,
Williams probably would have also claimed that he hurt his index finger by sticking
it into all fifty dikes and flood walls during Katrina to help stop the flooding.

For the longest time, for decades, in fact, I grew to
despise news anchors. It began with the hectoring voice of Walter Cronkite in
the 1950’s. But Brian Williams is representative of the smarmy, sneering, cynically
sanctimonious, slickly groomed face also telling me “that’s how it is.” Their
offensive, know-it-all styles of delivery made them personalities, not newsmen,
actors, not conveyers of truth, perhaps a rung and a half up from carnival
barkers.

This false news reportage has become a tradition among
news anchors, continued by the likes of Peter
Jennings and Dan
Rather, to whom news reportage/lying to the public is a “crude
art form,” akin to a Jackson Pollack canvas. These people are so desperate
to adhere to their politically correct agenda, and want to be remembered as the
electronic heralds of a “new world order,” that they are willing to fabricate a
glittering monstrance and substitute their glossy, patent leather faces for a eucharist.

Williams apologized
publically for lying to the public. But apologies are not enough in the way of
justice. He should be fired, perhaps sent back to Elmira, New York, and his Peabody Award—for his Katrina
hurricane reportage – recalled to lighten his luggage. Investment
Watch on February 6th noted:

A
host of military veterans and pundits came forward on television and social
media, challenging Mr. Williams’s assertion that he had simply made a mistake
when he spoke, on several occasions, about having been in a United States
military helicopter forced down by enemy fire in Iraq in 2003. Some went so far
as to call for his resignation.

In
his apology, Mr. Williams
said that he had been on a different helicopter, behind the one that had
sustained fire, and that he had inadvertently “conflated” the two. The
explanation earned him not only widespread criticism on radio and TV talk
shows, but widespread ridicule on Twitter, under the hashtag “#BrianWilliamsMisremembers.”

On my edition of the game show, “Truth or
Consequences,” Williams is asked, “Mr.Williams: When did American terrorists invade
England to reclaim all of Bill Clinton’s saxophones?”

Williams: “That’s a leading question, Ed, but it was in
1066.”

The eardrum-shattering, “Misremembering” buzzer sounds, the
audience goes “AWH!,” Williams looks pained, a trapdoor beneath his seat opens,
and he drops out of sight.

He pops up on the other side of the stage, strapped to a
chair, and the chairman of NBC, Bob Greenbatt, comes on stage with a bucket,
and proceeds to wash Williams’s mouth out with bars of soap to the raucous amusement of the
audience.

Well, no, that’s not going to happen. The worst case
scenario for Williams will be that he will be retired and sent back to Elmira
with his golden parachute. The worst case scenario for the public would be that
Greenbatt declares Williams to be an irreplaceable asset to NBC and is retained
after a brief term of absence from the screen.

The worst case scenario for the public – or that part of
it which still watches NBC Nightly News or anything else on NBC – will be that
Greenbatt says that Williams is an asset to the network.

The Washington
Post reported today (February 9th) that Williams’s story about gangs terrorizing
him at the posh hotel where he stayed during Katrina:

There’s a story Brian
Williams likes to tell. He has told it in a TV interview.
He has told it to at
least two book authors. But
even though it had all the makings of a great yarn — danger, guns,
resolve — Williams never reported it to his viewers.

It’s the one
about the gangs that Williams claimed had “overrun” a posh
Ritz-Carlton where he stayed during Hurricane Katrina.

Williams
is a born showman. With that baritone, that thatch of bronze hair, that
gravitas — when the NBC News anchor gets going on a story, little can stop him.
But that skill, which carried him to the highest echelons of broadcast
journalism, may ultimately prove his undoing. Following his concession that a
military helicopter he rode during the Iraq War didn’t take fire as he claimed,
Williams is now in hibernation mode. He hasn’t answered repeated interview
requests and, following an NBC announcement that his reporting on Iraq and Hurricane
Katrina is under
review, will now take “several days” off from the network.

So, Williams is standing in the
corner as his punishment, for a while, at least, hoping he’ll have another
chance to claim that ISIS has nothing to do with Islam. He may not be the congenital
liars that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are, but he nevertheless a liar.

The lies the news media have told me
are legion. Someday I'll compile a long, long list of them.

1 comment:

From Teresa Hermiz, who was unable to leave a comment here: "I wanted to comment on your latest but my not being on any social media seems to have made that difficult. If you want to share my comments with your lists I don't mind.

It took John Adams ten years of writing to the American people about Britain's plan to enslave the colonists for them to become revolutionaries. Adams was convinced that the people were too sensible and virtuous to be duped providing they were given all the information necessary to make the right decisions. A love of liberty, Adams wrote, included "a resentment of injury, and indignation against wrong. A love of truth and a veneration for virtue." (See Novanglus papers and Thompson's "John Adams and the Spirit of Liberty".) He knew that both submissiveness to the wrongs or anarchy would lead to tyranny.

My question is: after decades of Ayn Rand's writings and over 14 years of Ed Cline's to say nothing of a brilliant host of others such as Peikoff, Brook, Thompson, etc. why are Americans still reacting with submission and anarchy? We have been given the necessary information, the right decisions are not being made, tyranny is growing."